Automatic links from other domains when we create a new landing page - Is this a spammy technique?

[Ski-Online-Marketing-Team]

Hi everyone,

Recently we've discovered 2-3 sites (which we own the domains names) and these sites seem to automatically create links to our new landing pages on our main site. Those sites also can't be accessed in your browser as it redirects straight to our main website.

So, for example, we create a new landing page on our main site, and then Moz has been picking up links to this page from these other domains with text such as "Book now".

I think historically someone in the company set up loads of sites with redirects and there must be something automatically happening. Is this likely to be a spammy technique? Ie we seem to be getting "follow" links from other domains every time we create a new page."

Also as this could be quite a negative thing we've discovered I can't really give our out business links, but really appreciate your tips and advice.

I'm trying to work out what to do if this is a spammy technique and also affecting our trust scores etc and what we should do about it.

Thanks for your help and input. Mike

[EGOL]

I'm trying to work out what to do if this is a spammy technique and also affecting our trust scores etc and what we should do about it.

I think that it is a very spammy technique.

First items of work.

1. submit disavows to Google

2. remove this trash from its servers

3. find out who did this.  If a current staff member, I would consider their current worth to the company.  If it is low I would be discharging them.  If it is high, then I would educate them.  If a SEO service provider did this I would cancel any current contracts and not do business with them again.

[Ski-Online-Marketing-Team]

Thank you very much EGOL. Appreciate your input and suggestions! We'll be submitting disavows today as a first step.

[NickSamuel]

Hi there,

Personally I would simple remove the sites from the server first before even considering disavowing; depending on how many links Google has crawled disavowing could be a massive time sink which doesn't actually yield any benefits...

There's some decent discussion around Disavow here in the era of Penguin 4.0 algorithm update: https://moz.com/blog/do-we-still-need-to-disavow-penguin

I can't verify this but by Google logic those dodgy links shouldn't be having any impact.

As per EGOL, I would definitely get to the bottom of how these are being created, you need to know where the server is or how they are being added.

If you can't do this and don't need any of the main wildcard redirects then simply find where the domain is hosting and remove the DNS entries which point to the server...

Good luck!

Nick

[Ski-Online-Marketing-Team]

Thanks very much Nick.

I will have a read of the article you sent and we're probably going to remove all the redirects and disable the domains that we're not using but are causing this to happen.

I think this setup was created years and years ago. Our rankings are generally good (page 1), but we ideally want to clean up our link profile.